anniversary week
It's funny how something can be all over the news for weeks, and then sink like a stone in still water. Once the ripples are gone, no one remembers unless it's personal. For me, these are a little personal and I want to bring them back to public memory. The deaths of a few explorers who knew the risks they took are not much compared to death tolls of unsuspecting innocents in Indonesia, but in another way, every single death is an equivalent tragedy, to those involved in mankind. The cllustering of these, three accidents in a week, is especially painful:
January 27, 1967: Apollo 1 explodes on the ground, killing 3 astronauts.
January 28, 1986: Space Shuttle Challenger explodes during liftoff, killing 7 astronauts.
February 1, 2003: Space Shuttle Columbia explodes during re-entry, killing 7 astronauts.
Here are all their names. There are so many stories along with those people: Grissom's near-drowning on only the second US space flight ever, the Teacher in Space program that put MacAuliffe on Challenger and, most horribly, many students right there to watch her death, the Holocaust-era drawing by a young boy who died in the concentration camps, that burned up along with Ilan Ramon on Columbia. Too many stories. The good news though, news that would have gratified all 17 of those astronauts even if they had known their fate in advance, is that we're going back up. NASA is taking
safety precautions, and they have stocked the next mission with some top people. (Actually, all US astronauts are top people. I don't know what the selection process is like in other countries, but NASA has their pick of some incredible people, and they do pick them.) With luck, the next mission will launch at the beginning of May. With a little more luck and a whole lot of contingency planning, these astronauts will return home safely and with new knowledge.
Posted by dichroic at January 31, 2005 08:56 AM